side notes

I'm back, and hopefully for a while! With the difficulties of school and busy schedules, I think I lost interest in lucid dreaming last year, but I was thinking the summer would be the perfect opportunity to build up recall and maybe start having lucid dreams again! Anyhow, I read through my dream journal last night, and did a sorta WBTB, and ended up having a couple fairly vivid dreams, the latter of which SHOULD have been lucid, had I been paying enough attention. Also, I failed to write my first dream down, so now I barely remember any of it. Oh well, you win some and lose some.

Alaska Cruise (Fragment)

At 6:00 AM, I'm pretty sure I could have gotten a good couple of paragraphs out of this one, but by now... not so much. Basically, I was on a cruise from Vancouver up the coast of Canada and to Alaska with my family. I think I was looking for someone, or exploring the ship for some reason quite a bit, but other than that, I don't recall much.

Pulled Over

This one was a little more bizarre in some ways, and I really should have realized it was a dream. I was at a party, and decided to go ahead and go home early. After saying goodbye to my parents, I started to drive back. After leaving the house, which now that I think about it was more like a small mansion, I began to drive past a small suburb in a valley. The road was one way only (or at least without any yellow lines) and was built into the side of a steep hill. To the left was a decently sized group of houses, small stores, and other assorted buildings. As I drove, I was talking to my dad on the phone (talking on the phone while driving being something I'm sort of uncomfortable with still) who was telling me to come back to the party and help clean up. I told him I needed to pay attention to the road and would call him back, before I broke through a fence into a small industrial/factory area.

This is where it gets a little weird. It's a decent drop, maybe 6 feet or so, but it feels longer, and a lot bumpier. I try to regain control after landing, swerving a few times and dropping down some other small hills, before finally turning myself around and pulling the car back onto the road. At the same time, I find a gun in my car and decide to reload it (???), and when I notice a lever outside the factory I pull that too. No idea what it actually did, though. Anyways, as I pull up onto the road, a cop is driving by, and I accidentally run into them. Predictably, they pull me over, but somehow the scene shifts back to my bedroom.

At this point, the cop is interrogating me about why I had a gun (no idea), why I was driving so crazily (talking on the phone), and why I would decide to pull a random lever on the side of the road. At this point, I express the thought that I might even be dreaming, and ask the cop to hit me to make sure. He does, and then I slap my own hand, but I think I feel pain so I decide it isn't a dream. (Stupid stupid reality test! I know better than that! >_<). My dad walks into the room at this point, and says something along the lines of, "What have you done?" I explain that I was pulled over, then the scene shifts again.

Finally, we end up in the hallway outside of my bedroom. The cop is testing me to see if I've learned my lesson. He places a red, then a green lever in front of me. When I refuse to pull them, he seems satisfied, because I shouldn't pull a lever unless I know what it does. He turns the green lever around, and tells me that if I had pulled it I would have contracted a deadly Elephant STD. (Crazy brain. ) At this point, the dream ends.

I woke up, and was all, "See, I knew it was a dream!" I was more relieved that it wasn't real than disappointed in myself for not realizing that it wasn't.

So, I didn't remember any dreams last night, which really kind of sucked. I'm going to go ahead and copy some of my workbook into here again, for continuity's sake. I'm also going to be sure to keep a notebook by my bed tonight.

I probably should have expected that I couldn't have two good dream-nights in a row. Ah, well, here's how it went. I went to bed at 11:00, which was a little later than I was hoping for, anyways. I then had the same problem I had the previous night: I couldn't get myself to fall asleep.

I'm beginning to think this is a common problem between sleeping in general for me and my, as of yet, failed attempts to WILD. Basically, whenever I think about 'wanting' to fall asleep, I can't. On a normal night, especially when I don't have to do anything the next day, this isn't a problem, because I just lay down and don't worry about it. However, I've noticed that, for example the night before school starts each year, I have trouble falling asleep. It's that feeling of lying there, not exactly tense, or thinking about a ton, but being just the slightest bit anxious about falling asleep that seems to make it impossible. Last night, and the night before during my actual WILD attempt, was the same way. I'm not exactly sure what to do about this one.

So, anyways, it's a little before 11:00, and I can't fall asleep. I lay there until a little after twelve, when I decide to read a chapter or two of a book to get my mind off of it. (This is what I do to relax every night before bed, anyways.) I do this, and it seems to help, because within 15 minutes or so, I fall asleep. At 3:30, I'm going to guess the alarm went off, but just didn't wake me up. Any way around it, I don't remember a thing, so I'm guessing I was pretty well asleep at this point. Anticipating this, I had set an alarm for 6:00. This was a regular alarm, not one that stopped after 1 ring like the CAN-WILD one I had set for 3:30. As a result, it did manage to wake me up. I think I tried to WILD at this point, but I wasn't very motivated, so it failed as well. I laid there waking up on and off until 9:00, when I finally got up. I did have one dream during this time, but I didn't have my DJ by my bed, so I didn't write it down.

One last thing: sometime in the night, I'm pretty sure I started to enter SP, which is a first for me as well. Funny enough, it wasn't when I was trying to WILD, even. I felt vibrations over my whole body, but I think I must have gotten too excited, because they faded away fairly quickly and weren't accompanied by any HH. I laid still a little longer, to see if they would come back, but when they didn't, I did a RC or two. They all passed, so I must not have managed to fall asleep. Kind of interesting though.